I have also blogged for New Scientist’s ‘Real Scientists, Real Lives’ section Big Wide World. Follow the links below to these posts hosted on their website:
Passionate about hunting for little green men
Simulating Mars on Tenerife
The search for life on Mars thwarted by Hollywood
Dear Lewis, the other day I saw a UFO…
Post-doc: Career uncertainty is wearing us down
Gun at the ready, you are picking your way through an alien world, tracking an adversary. Spotting your chance, you launch an attack. It takes your foe by surprise, and you’ve got him cold. It’s the sort of scenario you’ll find in any first-person shooter game, but this one is different.
Aristides 
is a typical 13-year-old boy. He plays basketball after school, is learning the clarinet, and in the evening sits in front of his computer playing games. There is one game that he is especially keen on, however, which marks him out from his peers. Every day he logs on to www.fold.it, where, under the nickname “Cheese”, he plays a game that involves twisting, pulling and wiggling a 3D structure that looks a bit like a tree’s root system. He manipulates different lengths of these snaking green tubes until they fit into the smallest volume possible. It may sound like a rather bizarre game – a distant 3D relative of Tetris, perhaps – but it is in fact a brilliant disguise for one of the toughest conundrums facing biologists today: how do proteins fold?
In close-up
, they look like something out of a 1950s B-movie. Colonies of fossilised creatures, dubbed “hairy blobs”, have been discovered in one of the harshest environments on Earth. The find may turn out to be crucial for spotting signs of extraterrestrial life in rocks on other planets
Call it extraterrestrial bling. Fossilised sea creatures have been found that coated themselves in tiny diamonds created in the asteroid impact that killed off the dinosaurs.
Did life on Earth begin on a radioactive beach? That’s the claim of one astrobiologist, who says that life’s ingredients could have emerged from the radioactive sand grains of a primordial beach laced with heavy metals and pounded by powerful tides.
When I tell people that I spend my days testing the possibility of life on Mars they usually reply in one of two ways. ‘No seriously, what do you do?’ is only slightly more common than the wittier ‘So you’re not holding out for much fieldwork, then?’ Astrobiology is a bright young discipline, aiming to answer some of the most fascinating questions within science and dinner-table conversation alike. Does life exist ‘out there’ among the pinpricks of light in the heavens, or are we alone in the cosmos? No current scientific field fires people’s fascination more than the quest for extraterrestrial life, and a large proportion of students have cited the reason for continuing science is their interest in astrobiology. For now many astrobiologists’ money is on Mars, our planetary neighbour, as it was once a lot like Earth.
Floating around in microgravity inside a spacecraft might look like fun, but it can do nasty things to your body. With the current enthusiasm for crewed space flight and particularly NASA’s plan to send astronauts to Mars, there is a need to find ways to counteract the damaging effects of a lack of gravity.
In countless B-movies giant alien insectoids invade the Earth and wreak havoc, trampling through cities and tearing down buildings. Now we puny earthlings are hoping to turn the tables, and send insect-like robots to investigate the surface of Mars.